Millennium People

The phonetic alphabet, Marshall McLuhan tells us, requires only the eye as medium for comprehension:

“The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fosters and encourages the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms – particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, continuous and connected. The line, the continuum, became the organising principle of life.”

This post was originally going to explore how the fundamentals of a language impact upon our perception of space. Popular demand may see it revived.